Stephanie W. Jamison

Stephanie Wroth Jamison (born July 17, 1948) is an American linguist, currently at University of California, Los Angeles and an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She did her doctoral work at Yale University as a student of Stanley Insler, and is trained as a historical linguist and Indo-Europeanist. Much of her work focusses on Sanskrit and other Indo-Iranian languages.

Quotes

• Many of the most obscure images and turns of phrase in the Rig Veda make sense as poetic realizations of specific ritual activities […] every apparent barbarity in syntax, in word choice, in imagery is deliberate and a demonstration of skill whose motivation I must seek.
  • On translating the Rig Veda: three questions. In: Jones-Bley, Karlene, Martin E. Huld and Angela Della Volpe (eds.) Proceedings of the Eleventh UCLA Indo-European Conference; Los Angeles, 1999 (=JIES Monograph 35), 1-20. Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man.
  • quoted in Thomson, K. (2009). A still undeciphered text: How the scientific approach to the Rigveda would open up Indo-European studies. Journal of Indo-European Studies, 37(1-2), 1-72.

• I am not a poet: I can enjoy the talents and artistic sincerity of a Rig Vedic poet, but I cannot emulate it or imagine how it feels to be part of this creative tradition. I am a scholar (though not a theologian), and I can appreciate internally the intellectual effort and acuity employed to make sense of the religious traditions that confronted the scholar of the Bráhmana period. I would hope to have in some measure the same controlled intelligence, the flashes of insight, and the empathy that these ancient scholars brought to bear on the tradition they were trying to explain, and I would also hope that they would appreciate the fact that this tradition remains an absorbing intellectual puzzle to this day.
  • 1991, The Ravenous Hyenas and the Wounded Sun. Myth and ritual in Ancient India. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.quoted in Thomson, K. (2009). A still undeciphered text: How the scientific approach to the Rigveda would open up Indo-European studies. Journal of Indo-European Studies, 37(1-2), 1-72.

• The more I read the Rig Veda the harder it becomes for me – and much of the difficulty arises from taking seriously the aberrancies and deviations in the language… One can be blissfully reading the most banal hymn, whose form and message offer no surprises (I have come to cherish such coasting) – and suddenly trip over a verse, to which one’s only response can be ‘What??!!
  • quoted in Thomson, K. (2009). A still undeciphered text: How the scientific approach to the Rigveda would open up Indo-European studies. Journal of Indo-European Studies, 37(1-2), 1-72.
  • On translating the Rig Veda: three questions. In: Jones-Bley, Karlene, Martin E. Huld and Angela Della Volpe (eds.) Proceedings of the Eleventh UCLA Indo-European Conference; Los Angeles, 1999 (=JIES Monograph 35), 1-20. Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man. p. 10

Quotes about Jamison

• Within its soberly academic trio of hardback volumes, however, seethes an incoherent mix of mumbo-jumbo and misplaced obscenity, most of it apparently meaningless. It reads like a burlesque version, in the style of Hamlet Travestie, of a long lost original...
  Strangely, though, ‘spoked wheels’ have been introduced twenty-two times into this translation, as a new interpretation of the word aratí. This epithet of the fire god was previously understood to mean ‘servant’ or ‘messenger’... Given the current frantic search for evidence of ‘spoked wheels’ in the remains of the Indus Valley Civilization, the translation could even be considered irresponsible...
  As Hamlet Travestie slid into Dogg’s Hamlet I found myself wondering: could this be a long-hatched plot by the Pentagon to destroy Hindu fundamentalism at its heart?
  • Thomson, Karen. 2016. “Speak for itself: How the Long History of Guesswork and Commentary on a Unique Corpus of Poetry has Rendered it Incomprehensible.” Times Literary Supplement, 8 January: 3–4.
  • about Jamison’s and Brereton’s Rigveda translation, also quoted in Danino, M. (2019). Demilitarizing the Rigveda: a scrutiny of Vedic horses, chariots and warfare., STUDIES IN HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES Journal of the Inter-University Centre for Humanities and Social Sciences VOL. XXVI, NUMBER 1, SUMMER 2019